hey.
do you have any place where i can read up on nefesh b’nefesh’s encouragement for new olim to live in the occupied territories? i am not trying to be antagonistic, but i have not heard of that before. they do help place new olim in different locations, and maybe their approach has severely changed since i moved here a few years ago, but i never felt any push to move there.
thanks,
mk

This is a difficult question for a variety of factors. The first is that Nefesh is iron clad when it comes to disclosing their numbers of where immigrants go to live. They have to disclose according to US law because they are a non profit but they have refused all of my requests. Secondly, if you have a basic look at their community guide it is clear that the West Bank settlements are described as the best location to live in Israel. Compared what they say about Gush Etzion and Tel Aviv. It is fun, try it. There is something to this thought pattern and the notion that an overwhelming majority of there staff people actually live in the settlements themselves.

One of the reasons that I made this video was because of the difficulty I have had in trying to get information about the settlements. I figured that I would go to the airport itself and ask the new olim where they were moving. Out of 232 passengers, seven families, large families were moving to the settlements. I do not think that this can be ignored. As the NBN person notes, they help olim in every place in Israel.

I think that if you couple that with the fact that their website is overwhelming a real estate guide for places like Gush Etzion and Ariel as well as the fact that most of their staff live in the settlements AND the fact that it is impossible to actually get their data about NBN placing new immigrants in settlements, then we have a little story that needs to be talked about.

If they wanted to disprove this notion, they could simply released their stats of immigrants and we could see what percentage move to the settlements. Until now, they have refused.

Hope that helps. Be sure to check out their community guide on the website.

Thanks again for your posts. So disturbing to see this, when to me it seems this issue with the settlements is at if not beyond a crisis point. A couple of years ago, I saw a program on one of the Christian networks here were they were asking people to send money to Israel so they could move orphans in South America to Israel. The reasoning behind this was not “these children need help”, but “they are part of one of the lost tribes, let’s send them home”. Anytime I see anything here in the U.S. about immigration to Israel, it always has a sort of fanatical twist to it. I wonder if maybe Israel should slow down immigration period until after they pull back the settlements?